You are a genius! I bet more ppl use this tech when they make a painting, but your explination is simple yet thorough. I had an "AHAAAA"-experience, mostly because I never use color, maybe But it's a really good tutorial!

My photoshop only registers pen pressure for one thing; line width. Do you know how to set it to opacity as well, or does that have to be manual?...Of course, it could be because I'm working with outdated!Photoshop, but I'm just wondering if there's an option to refine tablet capabilities in Photoshop somewhere.

I know. Long time, but my friend has elements and I just figured out how to change it. Under the brush icon, there are several bubbles you can click on - instead of line, click opacity. This should make your brush pressure sensitive.

I don't much like them either, but they are good for big projects or commissions. It's something to present the client with. In fact, I have to do this for my job a lot, so I'm going to have to get used to the idea. LoL.

I use all of those, but only in at the end stages... meaning that I've set up well enough that I'm satisfied with it, but it needs something more. I'm trying to implement textures earlier on in my painting to see if it adds anything else.

I also play around with some of the levels and color balance, but not very much.

What I mean by don't cover up your values - sometimes, I'll put another layer on top of the overlay. I make it a good habit to not destroy the values that I worked so hard on getting, but rather making the color make the values pop out.

"fleshing out Thumbnails" - what I mean by that is basically creating thumbnails in Photoshop, or on paper. If you didn't already know, Thumbnails are mini versions of the picture you want to draw, but you're free to be messy and just test out compositions. You can come up with TONS of them before you decide on one you want to draw on. With this step by step, I kind of skipped that part, because the idea came so fast.